Amen to that. It is a tough path to navigate in this waiting time. He is doing his darndest to stay emotionally flat, and in a position to feel good about all possible outcomes. My job is to just listen. The less I say, the more likely he will be inclined to consider the options I would prefer anyway ;). But first, we have to actually have the options. Oy and sigh.
You all don’t even know. I have 89 babies I’ve shepherded through this process from PSAT and SAT prep to essay to supplements. I personally wrote 45 rec letters this year, and ghost wrote/edited another 10-15. Most are first generation college students. Most are competitive for selective institutions. It has been an emotional roller coaster, and I’m ending Friday with whiskey and cookies.
Well, it is cool you feel that connection, and best of luck with your kids. Speaking as a parent, knowing you are putting out the effort is so good to see and hear about. This weird process is so surreal that little touches of clear, real intent go a long way. Thank you.
Related story: as you and any parent of teens knows, College App Consultants are a huge business. They charge, oh, $7,500-$10,000 to oversee the entire process - pretty sure we discussed upthread.
We had NO desire to use one - paying for an ACT/SAT prep course is one thing, but this felt like…like a LOT of money, and so over the top. But WordBoy isn’t aiming low, and we needed to understand what they do and where they might add value, so we set up an appointment with a woman highly recommended by a teacher we like in our school system.
She was great - plainspoken, realistic, cut to the chase. She broke us down like a drill sargeant breaking down their weapon in field training - checking out WordBoy, his thinking on colleges and what he is hoping to get out of school, how we communicated, etc.
At the end, she goes “you don’t need me. He knows what he wants and can articulate it, you guys communicate well and are ahead of the game in your process. But I like him, so if you need me for one or two key moments, I’ll give you an hourly rate.”
??? !!!
It was perfect. Sure enough, we had two logjams, where WordBoy didn’t know how to approach important essay questions and had NO interest in hearing from me or my wife. (Parents: am I right? So frustrating!!) We connected with her for an hour, they talked and he nailed each essay.
She has followed up and just emailed us luck with the decisions happening today. She made relatively nothing from us but has been a nice voice in the process.
Another moment of sanity in an otherwise insane process.
Most of the full-time professionals I know are pretty good, largely because they can be: there’s such tremendous demand and so many people who need and are willing to pay full service that they don’t need to bully people who don’t need the service into buying it. And there’s no doubt that access to a person with really specialized knowledge helps in this journey.
However, the most corrupt thing about this whole business is the difference in access. There’s no professional code of ethics between admissions officers and college counselors, and knowing someone is a tremendous advantage. An admissions officer who knows you will call and say “Hey, Suzie’s counselor rec is a little weak, is there another counselor who could write a better one? I’ll swap it in.” If someone is waitlisted, you can call and figure out exactly what they’d like to see to move that kid to the top of the waitlist. And the debrief–tomorrow there will be a thousand calls from savvy counselors to admissions officers asking questions about why this kid or that didn’t get in, and there will be a lot of frank answers from those admissions officers. Being armed with that information is invaluable for preparing the next bunch. I present at state and national conferences that are about half college admissions officers and half college application counselors. A run of the mill public high school counselor has no idea this world even exists, and a first generation college student at that counselor’s school certainly has no way of knowing.
I graduated high school in 1984, and the guidance counselor was familiar enough with my grades and test scores and the requirements of various schools to suggest schools to which I should apply. (Some were pegged as reaches, some were safety schools and others were in the middle.) My brother’s kids have been going through college admissions in recent years, and in their school district, the counselors aren’t able to offer that advice. Partly this is because the counselors have many more students to advise.
Oh yeah, the College Application-Industrial Complex is far more tangled and fraught these days. My son’s public HS Counselor is a very nice woman, but has been polished smooth by years of interacting with over-the-top Achiever parents. She remains as neutrally supportive as she can be - focused more on managing the process itself. That is helpful, but it is hard to get some plainspoken coaching when you need it.
It’s helpful, though, to have advice from someone familiar with the admissions standards at various universities, because the parents (and interested parties like me as the uncle) have no experience with this. Is this kid crazy to think he has a shot at Yale? Is he aiming too low, and should be considering more selective schools? If he’s grown up in one part of the country, are there interesting schools elsewhere he should be considering?
Yep - that’s stuff we all wrestle with, for sure. It really depends on the resources one has access to and the quality of those resources. It is great when counselors can provide more coaching. But when you are at a public HS where 28 seniors are enrolled in BC Advanced Calc - and all of those kids and more will be applying for the maybe 1 slot each top-tier college may - may - allow for our public HS? Oy. The Counselor has to walk a fine line when a parent is looking for confirmation that their kid is Yale-or-whatever material.
They don’t reserve slots for schools–if you have a two really attractive candidates, they aren’t going to turn one away at random. We had MIT take 3 one year. Stanford took 2 this year, and none the year before, and two the year before that.
The real burdens are time and specialized knowledge. Keeping up with what programs are out there, how they rank, how selective they are, what they are looking for, what financial aid there is and for whom, etc. etc. is like keeping up with tax law. It’ a big mess of stuff that has some consistencies but many subtle changes over time, and a lot of what you are paying an expert for is just knowing things. A public high school counselor just can’t keep up.
The other issue is just having the time to work with the kid. In Texas, it’s pretty normal for the counselor/student ratio to be 1/400. Even if that’s only 100 seniors, that’s mindboggling. Just sitting down with each one for 30 minutes 2-3 times in the process is pretty much impossible. We process probably 50 highly competitive applications and 50 reasonably competitive applications a year. Among the various people working on this, it’s probably 3 full time positions (split among 5-6 people, not counting rec writing) and we could fill another full time slot with things to do without a problem. Now, most of ours don’t have any informed support at home, because they are first generation college students, but even the ones that do are a tremendous amount of work. In most schools, it just doesn’t get done. People don’t even know enough to know it isn’t getting done.
What you say is true, but by the same token, using 1 slot per top school is a good rule of thumb, with a +/-1 margin.
And yeah, getting some College Whisperer insight about what to target for your kid is what we all wish for.
Update: I don’t share a lot of personal stuff online and don’t want to be a brag, but I am excited to report that my son has options! He got into a couple of schools he really wanted to get into, including a special dual-major scholar program at an Ivy. Varying degrees of financial relief - so much to consider.
He is excited, but, like this OP, we have entered the just-as-important “which of the Accepts to actually take?” We are figuring out visits!
Oy, what a process.
Hooray for your son! Hopefully there are some wonderful celebrations going on in the WordMan household.
That’s awesome!
It was a bit of a bloodbath for us. A lot of that was because we pulled a bunch of applications when kids got into their first choice early and we’ve had a lot of good results up to now, but some was just because it’s a brutal process. We’re sending one kid to Harvard and one kid to nowhere special, and there’s not a lick of difference in their applications.
Thanks - yes, he is over the moon. The Scholar program admits 25 kids - a dual major in a Bio science and Business Management, right in the middle of his current interests as he looks ahead. And he is a musician and will have access to a great music scene.
Overall, similar results at his school - the distribution of the Yes’s isn’t clear, and the “resume’s” of the kids in question seem nearly identical. Once you take away the 4 or so Rockstar-Obvious kids who in our HS who got in early to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Yale (I think) this year, the act of getting differentiated in the pool of applicants has so, so, so many factors from the sublime to the laughably ridiculous. We’re still scratching our heads about what he heard back - but happy to be doing it from this POV.
It’s probably time for this thread to sink (ending on a high note with Wordman’s great news!) but for completeness’ sake, let me briefly share our thoughts on Texas and where we go from here.
Coming from Boulder, UT Austin doesn’t have a particularly nice feel. We all felt it was large, impersonal, and not especially appealing. While the Jefferson Scholars program seems like a good choice for his personal development, there was nothing to indicate that they form a really cohesive community that could become an emotional and intellectual home for him.
BUT then CairoSon met with a physics department rep, and he became much more positive. The things he heard - about the fact that the physics majors form a tight community, and research ops are good - are the sorts of things that sway him in favor of the school.
Poor CU Boulder, as lovely as it is, is probably out of the running now, for the simple reason that trusted sources rank Texas and Santa Barbara higher.
So the choice has been narrowed to two. Unfortunately we can’t visit UCSB; I wish we could, as I have a feeling it would sway CairoSon in that school’s favor. He called the physics department there yesterday and although his goal was to set up a Skype call later with a department rep, the person who answered the phone answered his questions in a really negative way. (“Research?!!! Hah hah hah, of course no undergraduate ever gets to participate in research!!!”) However, he’s e-mailing the person who looks like the physics dept freshman advisor, so hopefully that will net a friendlier response.
We’re also doing what we can on the waitlist front, despite knowing it is probably a lost cause. CairoSon has spent several hours crafting his letters (quite different for his two schools) and, taking advantage of family connections, the drafts have now been dispatched to a guidance counselor at a prestigious private school for review/advice before they are sent.
Anyway, this has been a terrific thread and some of the comments will have long-term impact on our son, I think, particularly regarding the need to be realistic about his chances. I already see some benefits; he’s starting to take a broad look at what opportunities he can have, maybe do a double major, etc. My guess is that UC Santa Barbara is going to win, assuming he gets a decent answer from the physics department. It’s rankings are pretty good, the research done there interests our son, the environment has got to be much better than Texas, and he’s in the honors program (which he is not at Texas). The comment that keeps echoing in our minds, from our physicist friend, is, “you’ll get more attention from the professors if you are in the honors program.”
Anyway…just wanted to record all that for posterity. If anything interesting happens (admission to one of the waitlist schools, choice of something other than UCSB), I’ll update the thread. Otherwise, if it dies a natural death, future readers can assume CairoSon, after a bit of wavering between UT Austin and UCSB, chose the latter.
(Also, if anyone going through the process ever wants to PM me in the future when YOUR child goes through this in a year or two, please feel free. Chats with other parents going through the same thing can be very helpful.)
Wait lists are not hopeless: It’s a rare year we don’t have 1-2 kids get in that were on a wait list.
Agreed - we had kids get into Yale and Brown last year off wait lists.
Still thinking about this CairoCarol. As a UCSB alum, I am sorry you got connected to a twit. Hope other communications balance that out and CairoSon can make a clean decision. As you and I have discussed, I got a ton out of my UCSB experience as a CompSci major, academically and socially. It’s a wonderful choice if he ends up leaning that way.
In a report from the front lines of college-decision parents, it is a battlefield out there. The Spring HS school play is this weekend, so everybody with kids involved are attending. A lot of unspoken rules - if your kid got into one of their target schools, don’t bring it up. Make small talk and if they don’t bring the topic up, let it go. Word gets around fast - if they congratulate you and/or offer their own update, cool. But a lot of looks of shock and/or processing the news.
It’s like your kid put on the Harry Potter Sorting Hat but the responses can be far more varied and unclear. Surreal. Glad to be past it soon and feeling positive about the possibilities.
UPDATE - CairoSon just got accepted at Haverford and is delighted. That is where he will be going to college.
We’d gotten really excited about UCSB and are sorry he can’t go there too.
Very exciting!!!
Congratulations. I know of one kid currently going there and one kid who is starting in the fall with your son. Very cool.